Communication of data over computer networks, particularly the Internet, has become an important, if not essential, way for many organizations and individuals to disseminate information. The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers using a client-server architecture in which any computer connected to the Internet can potentially receive data from and send data to any other computer connected to the Internet. The Internet provides a variety methods in which to communicate data, one of the most ubiquitous of which is the World Wide Web. Other methods for communicating data over the Internet include e-mail, usenet newsgroups, telnet and FTP.
The World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers, typically called “web servers”, that support documents formatted according to the hypertext markup language (“HTML”). These documents, known as web pages, are transferred across the Internet according to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”). Web pages are often organized into web sites that represent a site or location on the world wide web. The web pages within a web site can link to one or more web pages (or files) at the same web site or at other web sites. A user can access web pages using a browser program and can “click on” links in the web pages being viewed to access other web pages. Each time the user clicks on a link, the browser program generates an HTTP request and communicates it to web server hosting the web page. The web server retrieves the requested web page and returns the web page to the browser program. The returned web page can provide a variety of information, often referred to as content, including text, graphics, audio and video content. The content of a web site can inform and entertain visitors, provide a mechanism for carrying out transactions, and guide a user's web browsing experience.
Because web pages can display information and receive information from users, web sites have become popular for enabling commercial transactions. As web sites become more important to commerce, businesses are increasingly interested in tailoring the content of the web site to particular users or business goals. Consequently, efficient “content management” is becoming an important aspect of many web sites.
Content management applications determine which content is displayed on a web page. Some current content management systems use simple rules based approaches. In a rules based approach, a rule defines a set of criteria and one or more actions to be taken based on whether or not the criteria are met. A rule is executed when a particular predefined trigger is received. Triggers can be arbitrarily defined based on interactions of a user with a web site. For example, an HTTP request associated with a particular link on a web page can be defined as a trigger. When a user clicks on the particular link, the user's web browser will send an instance of the HTTP request to the web server. In response to the HTTP request, the content server can apply a rule to evaluate the HTTP request against a set of criteria to determine if the HTTP request meets the criteria. If the trigger meets the criteria, the content server can execute an action specified in the rule.
Current content management systems, however, are not sufficiently robust for real-time management of content and business processes. In current systems, an established rule will be applied whenever a corresponding trigger is received.
A user's interactions with a web site are not analyzed in real time to change whether or not particular rules are applied to a user or how the rules are applied. Moreover, information with respect to business processes, such as inventory management or promotional campaigns is not evaluated in real-time to determine if a rule should apply for a given user interaction. Instead, data analysis is performed on a batch basis to determine, for example, which content was viewed the most, which products were purchased the most and so on. Based on this batch analysis, the rules regarding what content is displayed to the user are reconfigured until the next batch analysis occurs. Thus, the rules governing which content is displayed remain constant between batch analyses, and each rule is applied on receipt of the appropriate trigger.